The Jeffrey Rubinoff Sculpture Park

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The Jeffrey Rubinoff Sculpture Park

The 200-acre Jeffrey Rubinoff Sculpture Park is home to over a hundred steel sculptures: artist Jeffrey Rubinoff’s life’s work.

The park is open to the public on select dates in the summer. Admittance, tours, concerts, and event are all free of charge.

04/28/2026

After early artistic success, Jeffrey Rubinoff’s father offered him the opportunity to develop a major regional shopping centre; a business venture that would provide financial security and creative freedom.

During this period, Rubinoff felt increasingly alienated from prevailing trends in contemporary art and disconnected from what he believed were authentic artistic values. While he found satisfaction and success in business, his artistic production slowed significantly between 1971 and 1980.

What followed was a deliberate return to not just making sculpture, but to building an environment where art could exist on its own terms.

The Jeffrey Rubinoff Sculpture Park stands as part of that legacy: a space created to protect artistic independence, sustain serious inquiry, and ensure that the work endures beyond the artist’s lifetime.

Explore the legacy on our website: rubinoffsculpturepark.org/

04/24/2026

“I bought this land to make art… I didn’t want to have any more orphan sculptures.” — Jeffrey Rubinoff, 2011 Yale Forum Sculpture Tour for Cultural Historians

In the 1970s, Jeffrey Rubinoff became deeply disillusioned with the commodification of the art world. Sculpture was becoming a product. Artists were becoming producers.

He chose another path. After purchasing the land in 1973, he farmed it, shaped it, and slowly withdrew from the commercial art scene by the late 1990’s. He refused to bring his business life to Hornby Island. This was to be a different place: one where art did not depend on market approval.

The Jeffrey Rubinoff Sculpture Park exists because he chose art over the market.

To learn more about the work of Jeffrey Rubinoff, visit our website: rubinoffsculpturepark.org

📸: Series 1-8, 1982, Stainless 304 steel

04/22/2026

In Cassiopeia 8, bone-like forms rise and pivot in space. Phalanges thrust upward on a bipedal base, an antlered mass curving around a hollow, spherical void. The sculpture feels unearthed rather than invented, as if lifted from deep time.

Jeffrey Rubinoff described this series as “an exchange of metaphors with the Burgess Shale… extending art history 600 million years.” [ 2011 Yale Forum Sculpture Tour for Cultural Historians] For him, artistic invention in form did not begin with civilization, but with evolution itself.

In Series 8, natural history becomes art history. Steel echoes bone. Structure echoes survival. The work asks us to see creativity not as separate from nature, but as something that has been unfolding for billions of years and continues through us.

Explore Series 6 on our website 👉 rubinoffsculpturepark.org/series-6

📸 Series 6-Cassiopeia 8, 1991, A 242 Cor-ten

04/17/2026

Not only is The Jeffrey Rubinoff Sculpture Park a place to view over a hundred steel sculptures by Jeffrey Rubinoff, it is also a space for creating, learning, and thinking.

Inspired by Rubinoff’s vision of art as a source of knowledge, the Park hosts exhibits, workshops, concerts, and open-park days where visitors are free to wander, reflect, and engage with art beyond its value as a financial or socio-political commodity.
Every initiative is an invitation to explore the intersections of creative expression, scholarship, and community.

The Park keeps the spirit of modernism alive, bringing together art, education, and innovation. It’s a place to see, think, and make, and to enjoy the inspiration of Rubinoff’s work firsthand.

Stay tuned for upcoming events, workshops, and park openings!

Photos courtesy of Chris Randle

04/15/2026

“...this was like somebody who is left-handed, being raised right-handed discovering who they really are. This was an enormous lesson for me.” – Jeffrey Rubinoff, 2011 Yale Forum Sculpture Tour for Cultural Historians

Raised in a farming community in London, Ontario, Rubinoff did not set out to become a sculptor. He entered university in Michigan intending to be a writer, until he encountered the studio.

From that turning point came a career output of over 100 sculptures, a sculpture park nurturing the value of art into the future, and a lifelong commitment to art as a serious source of ideas and inquiry.

Explore Rubinoff’s life and work on our website: rubinoffsculpturepark.org

📸: Jeffrey Rubinoff with Series 1-4, 1981, Stainless 304 steel

04/11/2026

“What happens with the temporal qualities of outdoor sculpture is that things really change. It is now in counterpoint… with things that have many different ages and different timelines.”
— Jeffrey Rubinoff, 2011 Yale Forum Sculpture Tour for Cultural Historians

For Jeffrey Rubinoff, sculpture outdoors was never static.

A work stands in relation to mountains formed over millions of years. Trees grow, shift, and shed. Weathering steel changes colour through the seasons. Even the sun redraws the sculpture daily through shadow. Each element moves on its own timeline.

When you walk around it, you experience immediate shifts in form. Return months later and its surface has deepened. Return years later and the trees have grown taller.

At the Park, sculpture is not isolated from time. It is placed directly inside it.

📸 : Series 7 - Hunter 3, 1997, Stainless 304 & Cor-ten A 242 steel
Photo courtesy of Chris Randle

Explore more of Series 7 on the JRSP website: rubinoffsculpturepark.org/series-7

04/09/2026

Rubinoff's Series 5 works are explosive, eye-level compositions centered on the introduction of the sphere into his sculptural idiom.

Incorporating this form required Rubinoff to master casting — a significant departure, as all previous work relied on welding and cutting. Cast in two halves, fused together, and painstakingly finished, each sphere appears seamless, as though it had always existed as one continuous whole.

In Series 5, the sphere becomes the focal point of each work, with every surrounding element organized around the space it occupies — echoing and contrasting one another in playful counterpoint.

There is a musicality to it: paired elements balanced in space, tension resolved through rhythm. The sphere anchors it all — complete, unified, and whole — while everything around it turns in quiet dialogue.

📸 Series 5-13, 1989, Stainless 304 steel

04/02/2026

Not only is The Jeffrey Rubinoff Sculpture Park a place for over a hundred steel sculptures, it’s also a space for creating, learning, and thinking.

Inspired by Rubinoff’s vision of art as a source of knowledge, the Park hosts exhibits, workshops, concerts, and open-park days where visitors are free to wander, reflect, and engage with art beyond commercial value. Every initiative is an invitation to explore the intersections of creative expression, scholarship, and community.

The Park keeps the spirit of modernism alive, bringing together art, education, and innovation. It’s a place to see, think, and make, and to enjoy the inspiration of Rubinoff’s work firsthand.

Stay tuned for upcoming events, workshops, and park openings!

📸 Series 2-2, 1983, Stainless 304 steel and Series 4-8, 1985, A 242 Cor-ten steel. Photo courtesy of Chris Randle

03/28/2026

Jeffrey Rubinoff turned to “On the Origin of Species” by Charles Darwin while working on Series 6. Within the series, there are three pieces Rubinoff called “War Pieces.” Pictured is one of them: Nike of Baghdad, 1991, A 242 Cor-ten.

For Rubinoff, evolution was not a comforting narrative of progress. It was a relentless, forward force. Time moves in one direction. Nature creates and destroys with the same indifferent momentum, and through this, history is reshaped.

“Evolution in time will continue with or without human existence…Art is the authentic internal scream against the suicidal nature of our rooted tribal culture.”
— Jeffrey Rubinoff, 2010 Company of Ideas Forum

Series 6 embodies this tension: steel forged in the shadow of conflict, wrestling with humanity’s capacity for both annihilation and creation.

For Rubinoff, art was not decoration. It was resistance.

Explore Series 6 on the Jeffrey Rubinoff Sculpture Park website: rubinoffsculpturepark.org/series-6/

03/25/2026

For Jeffrey Rubinoff, sculpture did not only sit on the land. It existed in counterpoint to it.

When he purchased Maplehurst Farm on Hornby Island in 1973, he began shaping the terrain with the same intention he brought to steel. Drawing on his background as a farmer and working together with lands curator John Kirk, he carved berms, formed ponds, cleared and planted deliberately. He wanted to not only tame the land, but to create a setting where sculpture and landscape could be in tension with one another.

The hills are not incidental. The sightlines are not accidental. Each placement was chosen by Rubinoff himself.

The sculptures stand against sky, forest, and field in a kind of visual dialogue: geometry meeting organic growth, forged steel meeting weather and time. The land changes with seasons; the steel holds its ground. Between them, a conversation unfolds.

At the Jeffrey Rubinoff Sculpture Park, the landscape is the collaborator.

03/20/2026

Across Jeffrey Rubinoff’s career, each series built upon the last: a sustained inquiry into structure, conflict, and form.

Series 3 began with early structural investigations: weight, balance, and the raw language of steel. Series 4 intensified that inquiry - dense, dramatic works marked by heavy forms, hidden cavities, and emotional tension. Interior spaces felt unresolved, almost turbulent. Series 9, his final series before his death in 2017, completes that arc.

Where Series 4 compressed space, Series 9 opens it. Where earlier works concealed interior conflict, the final works allow light to enter and pass through. The curved T-sections of Series 4 shift into open V-arrangements in Series 9: rhythmic, upward, spacious. The language is familiar, but transformed.

What began as structural struggle resolves into clarity.

Explore Rubinoff’s work on our website: rubinoffsculpturepark.org/

📸: 1. Series 3-3, 1983, A 242 Cor-ten steel
2. Series 4-12, 1986, A 242 Cor-ten steel
3.Series 9-1, 2010, Stainless 304 steel

03/16/2026

The sculptures at the Jeffrey Rubinoff Sculpture Park were never meant to be experienced from a single vantage point.

Jeffrey Rubinoff carefully shaped the land so that each work unfolds gradually as you move through the park. A sculpture might first appear across a field, then shift against the forest line, and finally rise against open sky as you approach.

Paths, berms, and clearings were intentionally formed so that the landscape reveals the work in stages.

Walking the park becomes part of the experience. Each step changes the relationship between steel, land, and horizon. Sculpture is not simply placed in nature, but is discovered within it.

Follow along to keep up to date with open-days and upcoming events.

📸: Series 2-2, 1983, Stainless 304 with Series 4-8, 1985, A 242 Cor-ten steel

Address

2750 Shingle Spit Road, Hornby Island
Union Bay, BC
V0R1Z0

Website

https://www.rubinoffsculpturepark.org/

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